Go to Joseph: The Patriarch of Egypt as a Figure of Saint Joseph

“Go to Joseph” (in Latin, ite ad Ioseph) is the answer Pharaoh gives to the starving Egyptians in Gen 41:55: he sends them to the patriarch Joseph, son of Jacob, who administered the granaries of Egypt during the years of famine. Catholic tradition applied this phrase to Saint Joseph, the spouse of the Virgin Mary, because the Joseph of Egypt is a figure (type) of the Joseph of Nazareth: just as the first guarded the wheat that saved a people from death, the second guarded the very living Bread come down from heaven, Jesus Christ. That is why the Church keeps repeating, to anyone in any kind of need, Pharaoh’s command: go to Joseph.

This article traces the phrase in the Hebrew original and in the ancient versions, the typological parallels between the two Josephs, and the enshrining of this reading in the Magisterium, from Pius IX to Francis. It forms part of our dossier on Josephology, the Catholic theology of Saint Joseph.

The phrase of Genesis in the original

In the Hebrew text of Gen 41:55, when the people cry out for bread, Pharaoh answers: לְכוּ אֶל־יוֹסֵף אֲשֶׁר־יֹאמַר לָכֶם תַּעֲשׂוּ (lekhú el-Yoséf, asher-yomar lakhem taasú), literally “go to Joseph; what he says to you, you shall do.” The Septuagint renders it: Πορεύεσθε πρὸς Ιωσηφ, καὶ ὃ ἐὰν εἴπῃ ὑμῖν, ποιήσατε (“go to Joseph, and whatever he says to you, do”). The Nova Vulgata preserves the Latin formulation that became proverbial: Ite ad Ioseph et, quidquid vobis dixerit, facite.

The Christian ear immediately catches an echo. At Cana, Mary says to the servants: ὅ τι ἂν λέγῃ ὑμῖν ποιήσατε, “do whatever He tells you” (Jn 2:5). The structure is the same as that of Pharaoh’s phrase in the Greek version. In the Old Testament, a pagan king points to Joseph and commands that he be obeyed. In the New, the Mother points to Jesus and commands that He be obeyed. Between the two sentences stands the house of Nazareth, where the incarnate Word Himself willed to obey Joseph and Mary (Lk 2:51). The spiritual tradition savored this encounter: to go to Joseph is always, in the end, to be led to do whatever Jesus says.

Joseph of Egypt and Saint Joseph: the typological parallels

Typology is not a devotional ornament. It belongs to the very biblical corpus on Saint Joseph: Scripture says little about him, but it offers, in the story of the patriarch Joseph (Gen 37-50), the prophetic mold of his mission. The parallels are numerous and precise:

• The name and the lineage. Both are called Joseph, a name that Scripture itself links to the verb “to add” (Gen 30:24), and both are sons of a Jacob (Gen 37:2 and Mt 1:16).
• The dreams. The patriarch is the dreamer who interprets Pharaoh’s dreams. Saint Joseph receives in dreams, on four occasions, God’s commands concerning the Child and His Mother (Mt 1:20 and Mt 2:13, 19, 22), as we show in the study on the dreams of Saint Joseph.
• Chastity. The first Joseph guards his chastity before Potiphar’s wife (Gen 39). The second lives a virginal marriage with the Mother of God, being called by tradition the “chaste spouse.”
• Egypt. One goes down into Egypt sold as a slave and there becomes an instrument of salvation. The other goes down into Egypt as a fugitive in order to save the Savior (Mt 2:13-15).
• The fatherhood received from God. The patriarch declares that God made him “father” of Pharaoh and lord of his whole house (Gen 45:8). Saint Joseph receives from God a true fatherhood over Jesus, which John Paul II describes in these terms: “his fatherhood, however, is not only ‘apparent,’ or merely ‘substitute’; rather, it is fully endowed with the authenticity of human fatherhood, with the authenticity of the paternal mission in the family” (Redemptoris custos, no. 21).
• The guarding of the wheat and of the Bread. The first Joseph opens the granaries and feeds the hungry. The second guards and sustains, by the work of his hands, the One who will say of Himself that He is the living bread come down from heaven (Jn 6:51). The guardian of the wheat prefigures the guardian of the Bread.

The typological reading in tradition and in the Magisterium

This reading matured in the prayer, the liturgy, and the preaching of the Church, which grew accustomed to applying the ite ad Ioseph to the spouse of Mary. But it was the modern papal Magisterium that gave it solemn form. On December 8, 1870, the decree Quemadmodum Deus, by which Pius IX declared Saint Joseph patron of the universal Church, opens precisely with the typology:

Quemadmodum Deus Iosephum illum, a Iacob Patriarcha progenitum, praepositum constituerat universae terrae Aegypti ut populo frumenta servaret, ita, temporum plenitudine adventante, cum Filium suum Unigenitum mundi Salvatorem in terram missurus esset, alium selegit Iosephum, cuius ille primus typum gesserat, quemque fecit Dominum et Principem domus ac possessionis suae, principaliumque thesaurorum suorum custodem elegit. (Quemadmodum Deus, ASS 6, p. 193)

In literal translation: just as God had appointed that Joseph, begotten of the patriarch Jacob, overseer of the whole land of Egypt in order to keep the wheat destined for the people, so, as the fullness of time drew near, when He was about to send to earth His Only-begotten Son, the Savior of the world, He chose another Joseph, of whom the first had been the type, made him lord and prince of His house and of His possession, and elected him guardian of His principal treasures. John Paul II recalls the gesture: “In difficult times for the Church, Pius IX, wishing to entrust her to the special protection of the holy Patriarch Joseph, declared him ‘Patron of the Catholic Church’” (Redemptoris custos, no. 28). We treat this title in the article on Saint Joseph patron of the Church.

Nineteen years later, Leo XIII took up the typology again in the encyclical Quamquam pluries (August 15, 1889), the first great doctrinal document on Saint Joseph: “El José de los tiempos antiguos, hijo del patriarca Jacob, era tipo de San José, y el primero por su gloria prefiguró la grandeza del futuro custodio de la Sagrada Familia” (Quamquam pluries, no. 4). That is: the Joseph of ancient times, son of the patriarch Jacob, was the type of Saint Joseph, and the first, by his glory, prefigured the greatness of the future guardian of the Holy Family. In the same encyclical, Leo XIII draws the ecclesial consequence of the figure: the divine household that Joseph governed with a father’s authority contained the nascent Church within itself, and therefore it is fitting that he should now protect, with his heavenly patronage, the Church of Christ (cf. Quamquam pluries, no. 3).

John Paul II, in the exhortation Redemptoris custos (1989), formulates the theological content of this guardianship: “Saint Joseph was called by God to serve directly the Person and the mission of Jesus, through the exercise of his fatherhood: precisely in this way he ‘cooperates in the great mystery of the Redemption, when the fullness of time arrives,’ and is truly a ‘minister of salvation’” (Redemptoris custos, no. 8). The expression “minister of salvation,” inherited from Saint John Chrysostom, entered the litany of Saint Joseph in 2021 as the invocation Minister salutis, alongside Custos Redemptoris and Fulcimen in difficultatibus, support in difficulties, according to the letter of the Congregation for Divine Worship of May 1, 2021. Francis, for his part, places Joseph exactly at the seam between the two covenants: “As a descendant of David (cf. Mt 1:16, 20), from whose root Jesus was to be born according to the promise made to the king by the prophet Nathan (cf. 2 Sam 7), and as the spouse of Mary of Nazareth, Saint Joseph is the hinge that joins the Old and the New Testament” (Patris corde, no. 1). The type and the antitype belong, both of them, to the same history of salvation.

Go to Joseph today

What, then, does “going to Joseph” mean in concrete Christian life? It means, first, recognizing that God willed to place a man as the steward of His goods. In Egypt, no one received wheat except by going through Joseph. In the economy of grace, God does not need intermediaries, but He willed to make use of them: He entrusted to Joseph His Son and His Mother, the principal treasures (principalium thesaurorum), as the decree of Pius IX says. To have recourse to his intercession does not turn one away from Christ, it leads to Christ, exactly as Marian devotion does. Francis sums up the experience of twenty centuries by saying that everyone can find in Saint Joseph “an intercessor, a support and a guide in moments of difficulty” (Patris corde, prologue).

It means, next, imitating what one contemplates. Joseph of Egypt forgave his brothers and provided for their sustenance. Joseph of Nazareth obeyed promptly, worked, kept silent, and served. Whoever goes to Joseph learns the active faith of “he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him” (Mt 1:24, cited in Redemptoris custos, no. 1). Such is the spirit of consecration to Saint Joseph: to hand oneself over to his fatherly guardianship in order to let oneself be led, with Mary, to Jesus.

It means, finally, hearing Pharaoh’s whole sentence. The text does not say only “go to Joseph,” it says “go to Joseph and do what he tells you.” Now, everything that Joseph “says,” he says with his life: he points to the Child he guarded. The ite ad Ioseph of Genesis flows into the “do whatever He tells you” of Cana. To go to the guardian of the wheat was to survive a famine of seven years. To go to the guardian of the living Bread is to find the One who satisfies unto eternal life.

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